Quitter

So you may say I have given up. My job. Smoking. Having a regular life. But I haven’t. I’ve just started.

See all my life I’ve kind of thought of the world as one big computer game. It’s not my fault really – I was brought up by TV and played a lot of them when I was young. To this day I can’t take my eyes off any sort of moving image behind a glass screen. Gambling machines in pubs. Windows out of trains and cars. Any old crap on any old TV. So not surprisingly my identification with life and reality has always been a bit hazy. Of course the things which I consume for fun hasn’t helped me either.

But my point is I realised that sometime in my teens I had been just waiting around for my life to finally start. That I’d fucked up so much so far, that I was just pissing around as I knew that eventually I would get fed up and quit and start a new game. Begin again at the beginning and get it all right. But of course along with this realisation came the fact that I knew that this would never happen. That no matter what I did, I would never get the time back which I had used up. That I had wasted. That I had been wasted during.

So I became a bit of a nihilist. Nothing mattered. Everything was about having fun. Which is fair enough I think in retrospect. I mean they were my formative years and taking it too seriously would have been just as regrettable at a later stage in life as not taking it seriously enough. But at least my way was fun.

And then I slowly by slowly began to betray myself. As I gave up on fun and tried to sort my life out, I started to listen to all the crap that I had sworn to myself that I would never listen to. To conform. And I wasn’t happy. I just thought that if I kept going for long enough that I would desensitize myself to it all, just like everyone else had. But then I remembered… I was going to do something different. I don’t need to be like everyone else. No-one does. It’s just easier to give in. So I stopped. And restarted.

As a mash-up fool once said, Suddenly I am Aware. Aware that life is big. It’s bigger than you, and you are not me. Ok, enough of the quotes. Well maybe not quite. As my point is, this isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning.